When a company hits turbulent times, a woman given the top job may end up falling down the ‘glass cliff’. Sarah Lang was shocked by what she found.
At Capsule, we’ve written a lot of stories about women at work. We’ve noticed that many of these topics are very much intertwined: pushing back against hustle culture, why perpetual striving might not make us happier, working-mum guilt, letting go of perfectionism, battling burnout, juggling work with the mental load and SO many more.
Then we got to wondering about what working women really want. As in, what do we actually want – rather than what are we ‘meant’ to want. Also, are there things that we don’t yet know we want, but might realise we want if we find out more? Are there more things we could ask our employers for? And what changes might we want to see in the workplace?
Welcome to our series What Working Women REALLY Want. If you have story ideas, or are keen to be interviewed about a topic, please email us at [email protected]!
Michelle*, then aged 44, was a senior executive in a large Auckland company when she was asked to be its new CEO. We can’t say what industry it is, because she’s worried about potential blowback were she to be identifiable.
“The company hadn’t been performing great – revenue was down, and a number of staff had left. Morale wasn’t good,” Michelle tells me. However, when she got the job offer, she felt excited rather than wary. “I’d always dreamed of being a CEO and had thought maybe it was never going to happen for me because, you know, the glass ceiling.” While the state of the company wasn’t ideal, she felt equal to the challenge.
Fast forward a year, and Michelle was asked to leave her position – and was replaced as CEO by an older, white man. She was shocked. “I felt devastated. I felt I was doing a great job. Revenue had increased, I’d developed good relationships with the staff and, so I thought, with the board, but I was being let go? It didn’t make sense. They couldn’t even give me a reason for it apart from some wishy-washy words about strategic direction. I’d come across sexism in the workplace before, but this was on a whole other level.”
A friend, who still worked at the firm, told Michelle that the new CEO mentioned to staff that Michelle had been at the helm during the ‘slump’. “Which sucked, because the slump had preceded me and I’d started to turn things around,” Michelle says. “I felt borderline defamed, and started experiencing anxiety.” There was another issue, too. When Michelle applied for other jobs, potential employers asked why she had only lasted a year at her previous job – a question that was difficult to answer. Perhaps her answer could have been ‘the glass cliff’. However, she’d never heard of the term.
We’ve all heard the term ‘glass ceiling’: a metaphor for the invisible barrier that prevents women from attaining the highest positions in a company. Turns out it has a relation: the ‘glass cliff’. You can scale it. but you can also fall from it – and because it’s glass, it looks invisible.
In her story for vox.com ‘Why Struggling Companies Promote Women: The Glass Cliff, Explained’, Emily Stewart explains that “a struggling company bringing on a woman to help right the ship is a common play – a phenomenon known as the “glass cliff’.” Emily writes that this happens when “women are elevated to positions of power when things are going poorly”. Often that’s during periods of crisis or downturn. “When they reach the upper ranks of power, they’re put into precarious positions and therefore have a higher likelihood of failure [in the position], meaning there’s a greater risk for them to fall.”
A struggling company might hire a woman from outside the firm – or may promote a woman from within. Why? Women are often viewed as having the ‘soft skills’ necessary to a smooth transition (e.g., restructuring) or improved image. After all, women are used to clearing up men’s messes. Then, when things stabilise, a woman is often replaced by a man. Maybe she’s fired or made redundant, maybe she’s restructured out of a job, maybe she feels pressure to quit. This can happen not because of her performance but because the slope was already slippery – and she can become the ‘fall guy’ (or ‘fall girl’), like Michelle was.
The elevation of a woman in a company can also happen at a ‘transitional time’. Jane*, a 39-year-old from Wellington, was offered a senior-executive position when the company she worked for restructured. Jane now thinks the restructuring was just a ploy to excommunicate a workplace bully without the company having to face that person’s potential legal accusations of a ‘constructive dismissal’ (where an employee feels they have no choice but to resign). The bully was forced out. But soon afterwards, Jane was restructured out of her job when the company’s previous business structure was reinstated. “My CV will always state that I didn’t last six months in that role. It made me feel so insecure. I was the sacrificial lamb.”
A book called The Glass Cliff is slated for release in March. The London-based author is equality- and anti-racism activist, speaker and workshop facilitator Sophie Williams, who has done a Tedx Talk called ‘The Rigged Test Of Leadership. She describes the glass cliff as “an experience of taking on a leadership role only to find that your chances of success have been limited before you’ve even begun”. Sophie argues we must stop treating women and racially marginalised people as caregivers, scapegoats or collateral damage in a time of crisis.
Cliff notes
So, the term ‘glass cliff’ is about to become a book title, but it’s been around for a while. In 2003, an article in U.K. newspaper The Times (which to this day has never had a female editor) was titled “Women On Board: Help Or Hindrance?” and the intro was: “SO MUCH for smashing the glass ceiling and using their unique skills to enhance the performance of Britain’s biggest companies. The march of women into the country’s boardrooms is not always triumphant – at least in terms of share price performance.” The article referenced the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index (also called the FTSE 100 Index or the FTSE 100): a share index of the largest 100 qualifying U.K. companies by market value.
“Analysis of FTSE 100 shares,” the article said, “shows that companies that decline to embrace political correctness by installing women on the board perform better than those that actively promote sexual equality at the very top”. WTF? Having female leaders is PC? Sexual equality is bad? Case closed?
Nope. Following this article, psychology professors Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam from the University of Exeter looked at the FTSE 100 to assess the circumstances surrounding periods of stock-market decline. The interesting thing was what had happened before the declines. Companies that brought women onto their boards were likelier to have experienced a decline in performance in the preceding five months than those companies who brought on men. And so the term ‘the glass cliff’ was coined.
“Women are more likely to occupy positions of leadership that are risky or precarious,” researcher Michelle Ryan has said. “This can happen when share price performance is poor, when facing a scandal, or when the role involves reputational risk.” On the TV show Succession, Gerri and Rhea (both women) were made CEO of Waystar-Royco at times of reputational risk – but it was temporary, with the role going back to a man (founder Logan Roy) then, after his death, to another man.
If only this just happened on TV. As reported by The Guardian, management professor Alison Cook and sociology professor Christy Glass from Utah State University examined Fortune 500 companies (an annual list compiled by Fortune magazine ranks 500 of the largest U.S. corporations by total revenue). “The study found that boards are more likely to promote women and minorities to top leadership roles when an organisation is in crisis, and when companies led by minority and women leaders decline, boards are more likely to replace these leaders with white males.”
In separate research, Cook and Glass found via interviews that women who became top executives at Fortune 500 companies took risky positions throughout their careers in order to be more visible and prove their leadership capabilities. Some characterized themselves as ‘turnaround artists’.
Risk and reward?
If a woman is hired for or promoted to a leadership position, she may be (at least somewhat) abreast of issues in the company, but may also be so eager to smash through the glass ceiling that she’s willing to take a risk.
But risks don’t always bring rewards. As recent BBC story ‘The Invisible Danger Of The Glass Cliff’ states, glass-cliff positions can “come with significant downsides – including stress, burnout, and derailed careers”. The article states that “countless female leaders [are] given a precarious leadership position and left standing on the edge of a ‘glass cliff’”. And it cites the example of Carol Bartz.
“When Bartz was appointed CEO at Yahoo in January 2009, the internet company was struggling. She was hired on a four-year contract and put forward a strategic plan to turn things around. But in September 2011 – in a phone call with Yahoo’s chairman of the board – she was fired, just two years and eight months after she’d joined the company.” Without letting that four-year plan come to fruition.
Bartz spoke about this in 2018. “Listen, it’s absolutely true that women have a better chance to get a directorship, or a senior position if there’s trouble. It’s not that all of a sudden the boards wake up and say, ‘Oh, there should be a female here’. They do that sometimes, because [later] it’s easier to hide behind ‘Well, of course. Of course that failed, because it was female. What could we have been thinking?’.’’
On September 1, it was announced that Rosalind Brewer was no longer chief executive at U.S. retail and pharmacy chain Walgreens, just two-and-a-half years after her appointment. Brewer was appointed during the height of the pandemic and at a time when the company was shifting away from pharmacy and retail to focus more on health-care services. In addition to leading that pivot, Brewer oversaw the complicated rollout of the Covid vaccine at pharmacies, and the enforcement of pandemic safety standards, also driving equity of access to vaccines.
Yes, share prices dropped during her tenure, but, then again, what did the board expect between Covid and the company changing direction? Business analysts commented on the strangeness of Brewer’s departure. The company said it was a mutual parting, but who knows? On LinkedIn, several business leaders have mentioned the term “glass cliff” in reference to her departure.
When appointed, Brewer was the only black woman to be a chief executive among the Fortune 500. The New York Times reports that, this year, gender diversity has fallen within the top ranks of retail companies, saying “industry observers see a loss in gender representation”. It added, “in general, it is rare for a female chief executive to be succeeded by another woman regardless of the industry”.
And in politics? The Guardian reports that “the growth in the number of female leaders around the world has plateaued and in 2023, a number of prominent female leaders have left office to be replaced by men”. Jacinda Ardern being one of them.
Anecdotally, many women don’t speak openly about such things, worried about blowback. It’s no wonder that Michelle and Jane didn’t want to be named. Their CVs and their mental health suffered. They don’t want to risk falling off the glass cliff again, so they’re ducking beneath the glass ceiling.
Glass that’s invisible.
